For my money Seau was about the closest thing to Mike Singletary I saw after Singletary left the league. Kind of picked up that baton with the intensity and the ability to play all three downs, sideline to sideline.

Gendo, writer of FireJerryKill had a great piece on that sort of thing, he just published.

Swerb wrote:Go start a blog if you want to tell the world your incomprehendible ramblings.

Cerebral_DownTime wrote:I have a big arm and can throw the ball pretty damn far...... maybe even over those moutains. The Browns should sign me, i'll let you all in locker room to drink beer. Then we can all go out the parking lot to watch me do motorcycle stunts.

ELSA/GETTYJunior Seau, the former NFL great, died early today of an apparent suicide, a bullet to the chest, at forty-three. If today is an average day, another one hundred Americans will have killed themselves before midnight. Their names will not make nearly as much news.

Seau's death, not incorrectly, will become another in a long string of indictments against football. There are patterns here, of players coming out of the NFL damaged beyond repair, many with broken brains, and with an unacceptable — what a strange word to use when talking about young corpses, implying that some amount is acceptable — percentage of them dying prematurely. The inevitable autopsy reports — both the actual ones, and the countless dissections you'll read in the coming days and weeks — will find both biological and psychological causes of death. Some of the players will die because 350-pound men routinely die from the load they carry; some of them will die because of concussions and concussion-related symptoms; some of them will die because, like Seau, they decide that death is a better alternative to life. And some of them, many of them, will die because of a combination of those factors, x + y. We know this to be true. These are mathematical facts.

Because Seau apparently shot himself in the chest, his death will be inevitably compared to Dave Duerson's, the former Chicago Bear who also shot himself in the chest last year, better to preserve his brain for science and lawsuits. There is no doubt that over his twenty brutal seasons in the NFL, Seau suffered his share of brain damage. There will be dark shadows found inside of him. And everyone will talk about how something has to change and how terrible this all is and, gee, is it really worth all this for a game? And then everyone will buy their tickets and popcorn and get ready for some subtly altered version of football.

This is an incredibly complex issue, of course. It's not going to be solved quickly or with bandages. It's pointless, in fact, to try to find a single answer — "the golden BB," accident investigators call it — to a collection of a thousand questions.

Why do football players kill themselves? On the surface, at least, they do it for the same reason hockey players like Rick Rypien and Wade Belak do. And for the same reason taxi drivers and ballet dancers and poets and construction workers and janitors and teachers and doctors do: They do it because they are depressed, because they are in such a dark place that they choose death. It's a hard thing to think about, but if you do anything in the memory of Junior Seau today, please think about this for a moment: How bad would your life have to be for you to put a gun to your chest and put a bullet into your heart? How deep would be that despair?

Now, why are they depressed? That's where everything divides, and the equations become much more complicated. But one of the root problems among the many is that happy people have short memories and sad people have long ones. We forget or we ignore or we get busy doing something else, and all this time, someone is sitting at home with a gun in his hand and trying so hard not to remember, trying like hell to believe that the future will not be like the past.

In that moment, those who fail, those who can't get beyond their own mistakes or the sins that have been committed against them, they will join the ranks of the self-inflicted dead. Your guilt won't have saved them. Those who find something, anything, to hang on to, some cause for hope or optimism or even an outstretched hand, survive. Your love will save them.

And yet those who are dead will be called cowards by those who don't understand the certainty that this takes, or selfish, or they will be looked upon with distant pity, the way Junior Seau will be talked about these next few days until something else comes along to distract us. And those who have lived, you'll see them at the grocery store or in the office or on the pages of a magazine and you won't have any idea how close they were to becoming a small pile of bones in the ground or ashes in a tin on a shelf. And life will continue apace, the way it always does, after the requisite amount of handwringing and words of commiseration, and here we'll all be, observing a moment of silence in one instant and careless and forgetful again in the next, and another 3,000 or so Americans will disappear every month, and we'll hear only about the one or two of them who wrote songs or drew buildings or played football, because the rest of them, the literal and figurative piles of dead, we wouldn't dream of changing any of the rules for them. We don't even know their names.

peeker643 wrote: If today is an average day, another one hundred Americans will have killed themselves before midnight.

Can we nominate?

No sympathy for this dead man. Dante had it right. This guy just had to chill and enjoy his riches. If he was terminal he should have waited the it'd be OK.

I get all that. But he's gotta be sick, right?

No correlation at all between 35 years of idolization and an inability to function away from it?

Not being a dick (purposely). Just think this is a strange case. Mix of machismo and code and illness and a bunch of stuff that's hard for me to gather up and think about. Thought the author did a good job of it.

You know anyone who battles depression? Honestly asking.

How dark a place a guy like that have to be in to do what he did. It's just nuts.

peeker643 wrote: If today is an average day, another one hundred Americans will have killed themselves before midnight.

Can we nominate?

No sympathy for this dead man. Dante had it right. This guy just had to chill and enjoy his riches. If he was terminal he should have waited the it'd be OK.

I get all that. But he's gotta be sick, right?

No correlation at all between 35 years of idolization and an inability to function away from it?

Not being a dick (purposely). Just think this is a strange case. Mix of machismo and code and illness and a bunch of stuff that's hard for me to gather up and think about. Thought the author did a good job of it.

You know anyone who battles depression? Honestly asking.

How dark a place a guy like that have to be in to do what he did. It's just nuts.

Besides Jesse? Or JTFC from old BTNG?

Sorry bro. can't muster up any sympathy. Get some prozac and njoy your millions, doosh.

Just saying, my wife has struggled with depression all her life, and I honestly think I'd rather have cancer than depression. It is the worst thing I can think of to suffer.

And the worst symptom of depression is the feeling that you can't do anything about it. Depression twists your brain into believing that depression is normal, that there's nothing wrong, you're just supposed to be in intense mental pain the likes of which no one else can understand. That you deserve that pain, so why should you seek help?

You can't seek help because, if you could, you wouldn't have depression.

In the mind of a depressed person, the only think worse than the pain you feel from the disease is the shame you'd feel if anyone else knew how badly you felt. It's a real catch-22, the kind that causes even the toughest of people (like most NFL players) to "take the cowards way out" and kill themselves.

Look, suicide is a terrible thing. It is one of the most hurtful things a person can do. But I have every sympathy for someone who suffers depression because it really does trap you in a way that a person who hasn't seen it might not be able to understand. Hell, it took me seven or eight years to understand in dealing with my own wife.

Ziner wrote:Sorry to hear that bac. I was going to attempt to reply with something similar but you did a far better job than I would have of showing exactly why JB is an asshole

Thanks, and for the record, she'd doing the best she's even been.

But I don't JB is an asshole. I's very easy to think that suicide doesn't deserve sympathy. When someone commits suicide, they are lashing out at everyone who loves them and causes them intense, soul-crushing pain. It's an easy thing to hate and, from any objective point of view, it is the cowards way out.

BUT what I'm saying is that depression makes it not an objective thing. Depression doesn't give you the choice. You're not taking the cowards way out, you're taking control of the situation the only way you can because your own brain has trapped you in this position where you feel powerless to do anything about the most intense mental pain you can imagine. Pain your own brain is telling you you deserve. Pain your own brain keeps telling you is your fault; is what you're supposed to feel. Pain that will never go away. Pain you have no control over.

That's depression. That feeling of being trapped and helpless while in intense pain.

Ziner wrote:Sorry to hear that bac. I was going to attempt to reply with something similar but you did a far better job than I would have of showing exactly why JB is an asshole

I get the wink.

But heres my point. If he had clinical depression enough to mitigate all this, why didn't he do his Cobain when he was a big giant football star?

Gotta love America. Everyone gets a pass for everything.

You're still thinking about it logically, and that's the problem.

We're talking about a malfunctioning of the human brain, the most complicated organic structure in nature. We don't know what causes someone to hit rock bottom and kill themselves. It can be anything. People will try and kill themselves sometimes as the first symptom of depression, other times it will be multiple decades before a suicide attempt happens. Sometimes no attempt is ever made.

But logic has nothing to do with when or if a suicide attempt happens to a depressed person. Not a thing.

Ziner wrote:Sorry to hear that bac. I was going to attempt to reply with something similar but you did a far better job than I would have of showing exactly why JB is an asshole

I get the wink.

But heres my point. If he had clinical depression enough to mitigate all this, why didn't he do his Cobain when he was a big giant football star?

Gotta love America. Everyone gets a pass for everything.

Dunno man, I have never had depression so I am not sure what goes on in the brain or how long it takes to develop or what makes it worse or what holds it off. But I do know people who have taken their own lives due to it.

Are we allowed to give people passes for dying due to cancer or they just pussies for not overcoming it? Mental diseases are diseases.

Spin wrote:Depression is one thing, multiple head injuries take this to another level. If the depression (if he had it) is related to had injuries, then meds for clinical depression would not help.

We haven't scratched the surface on the long term effects of multiple head injuries yet. I would wait before pointing fingers...

Actually I shouldn't say that. A head injury could physically damage the serotonin supply, or it's reuptake. I have nothing to back this up, just one guy thinking. And there are several known causes of clinical depression. But it is not impossible to think physical damage could not result in "clinical" depression.

CAVSTRIBEBROWNSin07! wrote:I've had 4 concussions and I'm only 26. Am I going to kill myself?

Nothing is definite but if recent history has shown us anything, yes, you are much more likely to suffer symptons of CTE (which can lead to suicide) than people who have not suffered multiple concussions.

Depression is one thing, multiple head injuries take this to another level. If the depression (if he had it) is related to had injuries, then meds for clinical depression would not help.

We haven't scratched the surface on the long term effects of multiple head injuries yet. I would wait before pointing fingers...

I've fallen and been hit on the head so many times I can't even see straight. Nothing is wrong with me.

Think he Said "ow" ?

That would depend on the extent of damage. They obviously caused SOME damage, you wound up going to Kent State.

What they're looking at right now is players going back out with a concussion and being reconcussed. They're thinking that cumulative effect is much more damaging than the cumulative effect of getting a concussion every year or every couple of years.

CAVSTRIBEBROWNSin07! wrote:I've had 4 concussions and I'm only 26. Am I going to kill myself?

Nothing is definite but if recent history has shown us anything, yes, you are much more likely to suffer symptons of CTE (which can lead to suicide) than people who have not suffered multiple concussions.

What they're looking at right now is players going back out with a concussion and being reconcussed. They're thinking that cumulative effect is much more damaging than the cumulative effect of getting a concussion every year or every couple of years.

I think they're actually going a step further, not only focusing on concussions but on the many, many, many hits that each player takes throughout a game/season that do not lead to a concussion. It's looking like you don't need to have diagnosed concussions to suffer from CTE, it could arise just from normal, "safe" hitting/tackling during a football game. Seems like 1000 mini-headshots are as bad as 1 concussion. It gets downright scary when you combine the two....

CAVSTRIBEBROWNSin07! wrote:I've had 4 concussions and I'm only 26. Am I going to kill myself?

Nothing is definite but if recent history has shown us anything, yes, you are much more likely to suffer symptons of CTE (which can lead to suicide) than people who have not suffered multiple concussions.

CTE = Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy

Fuck. May as well get it over with then.

Isn't being a Cleveland fan just Long-Term, slow suicide anyway? I see it as similar to smoking.

jb wrote:I've fallen and been hit on the head so many times I can't even see straight. Nothing is wrong with me.

Think he Said "ow" ?

I like that you're kinda preaching personal responsibility. Always gives me a little bit of hope for future you.

But Mo Money, Mo Problems. The idea that access to healthcare solves problems like this is nonsense. Suicide is wrong and is never the only way out. That should be the first and last thing that should be said about this.

Sucks for the people who supported him. Some of them might have seen this coming, some might have been blindsided, but all will think they could have done something to stop it. Maybe. But probably not. People who become as good as Junior was do so in part because of their god given talent and in part because of the chemical rush they get as the center of attention. When they can't get that rush they crash and not everyone has the fortitude to be able to live w/o it. And it's been true since long before Icarus got his wings and will be true long after now.

Also ESPN can go eff themselves for putting his Moms in their SC rotation and just letting it go unedited. What a horrible abuse of a grieving mother's anguish for a small boost in ratings. One of the most despical things I've seen on TV in a long time.

Haven't read too much detail on Seau's situation, but if it is true that he suffered depression, can we really make the leap that it was caused by football-related injuries? I mean...do we know that? The "multiple concussions leads to suicide" assumption seems a stretch. And I don't discount for a minute the notion that debilitating pain (physical, like Duerson's...or mental anguish) can leave people thinking that suicide is the only release from it.

As a nation we celebrate "choice"...that is, unless and until those choices are unsettling to us. Seau made his, and I suspect that's where jb was coming from. You'd think people who cared about him would be glad for the end to whatever pain he was suffering, and their sympathy reserved for those hurt by his passing.

The bigger picture though, is that as football fans, we have to be conflicted (okay...at least I am) about continuing to patronize and support a sport we know is causing long-term brain damage to a not-insignificant percentage of its participants. As a society, we have become less enamored of boxing over recent decades after it became obvious that its express goal was to win by causing enough temporary brain damage to the opponent that he was unable to continue. (And just one look at the shell of a man that used to be Muhammad Ali tells us it's not really temporary at all.)

A work colleague of mine thinks the entire enterprise of high school football is in jeopardy if for no other reason that sooner or later, insurance companies will be unwilling to write liability policies for it, and schools will be unwilling or unable to risk the lawsuits that could result. Fodder for a column one of these days.

"I believe it is the nature of the human species to reject what is true but unpleasant and to embrace what is obviously false but comforting." H.L. Mencken

Spin wrote:That would depend on the extent of damage. They obviously caused SOME damage, you wound up going to Kent State.

Fuck you Spin, I've had food babies with more inherent value then the entire city of Akron.

The multiple concussion issue is huge.

We've got an entire Concussion Protocol now that includes being cleared by 2 doctors, a trainer, and passing a cognitive function test. And a required 7 day waiting period after symptoms have subsided before any kid is allowed back on the field.

The soothing effect of the suicide option to the person committing it is - unlike most big decisions - you don't have to worry about the consequences. You don't have to deal with your family's grief or people calling you a coward or your bills or your bitchy girlfriend or your car engine or your job or your weight or your cholesterol level or growing old or your health insurance or your pension. You just get erased, and everything else gets erased with it.

Hikohadon wrote:The soothing effect of the suicide option to the person committing it is - unlike most big decisions - you don't have to worry about the consequences. You don't have to deal with your family's grief or people calling you a coward or your bills or your bitchy girlfriend or your car engine or your job or your weight or your cholesterol level or growing old or your health insurance or your pension. You just get erased, and everything else gets erased with it.

Hikohadon wrote:The soothing effect of the suicide option to the person committing it is - unlike most big decisions - you don't have to worry about the consequences. You don't have to deal with your family's grief or people calling you a coward or your bills or your bitchy girlfriend or your car engine or your job or your weight or your cholesterol level or growing old or your health insurance or your pension. You just get erased, and everything else gets erased with it.

Hikohadon wrote:The soothing effect of the suicide option to the person committing it is - unlike most big decisions - you don't have to worry about the consequences. You don't have to deal with your family's grief or people calling you a coward or your bills or your bitchy girlfriend or your car engine or your job or your weight or your cholesterol level or growing old or your health insurance or your pension. You just get erased, and everything else gets erased with it.